I've been following the discussion with interest, as I'm about to embark on the
adjudication of the IOTA contest (some 1220 logs here so far, about 400k QSOs
in the database).
First observation is that unqiues only apply to QSOs which cannot be verified
by cross-checking of logs received. In other words, if my log has HC8K as a
unique, but HC8N sends in a log, it pretty soon shows up that this wasn't a
unique at all, but a broken call. Interestingly, for this contest (I don't have
the stats for CQWW or ARRL), I can cross-check 80% or more of the QSOs in the
logs from "casual" entrants, because they will have tended to work the more
serious entrants, who will have sent in a log. Indeed, with the ease of sending
a log these days, the percentage of players who send in a log of some sort
(even if only as a check log) is increasing every year. I went one step further
this time - for those island entrants who had made a reasonable number of QSOs,
but hadn't sent in a log by the deadline, I tried to contact them to invite
them to send in a check log. This has been amazingly successful - I was able to
find e-mail addresses for something like 75% of the stations concerned, and
probably some 75% of those responded to my pleas for a log. In other words, an
overall success rate of something like 50%. I know other contest organisers
(e.g. EU Sprint) have been doing something similar. All of this helps to reduce
the issue of uniques.
So we are then left with a minority of QSOs in logs, where no cross-checking
can be undertaken. In the past it was hard to do anything about these, with the
result that a number of regular entrants started to pad their logs - this is
why it became an issue. For some of these offenders, it actually made a
significant difference to their contest placing; hence why contest organisers
started to take the issue seriously. Nevertheless, I have been surprised to
read that some organisers (e.g. LZ contest) appear to penalise uniques as a
matter of course. The golden rule should always been "innocent until proven
guilty". But there is quite a lot a contest adjudicator can do to determine
whether a call really is a unique. For example, if I found "G2XTT" in a log,
I'd bust it - not because it's a unique, as such, but because I know such a
call doesn't and cannot exist. There are many similar examples (N6AA has done a
lot of work on this as, I am sure, have others). Equally, in IOTA I have the
benefit that it's a serial number contest.. If a unique appears, and had given
a serial of 003, then it may indeed be a casual IOTA chaser who gave out a
handful of contacts while chasing some new islands. I have the recourse, should
I so wish, of e-mailing the station concerned, to ask whether the QSO was
valid. If he says he didn't go near the radio that weekend, then it's a busted
call .. If the received serial was 1349 (for example!) then there's something
very wrong - anyone who had been that active wouldn't appear as a unique, so
there is some other explanation, and I can start looking for it (an obvious
broken call, perhaps?).
Which, I think, all goes to say that uniques should not be busted simply
because they are unique, but that contest adjudicators have other means to
determine, in at least some of the cases, whether "innocent" or "guilty". Of
course, these methods can be time-consuming, so are probably only worth
pursuing where there is a close call for one of the coveted certificates or
trophies. For the most part, it really isn't worth the effort! What I do try to
do, though, is to indicate in contestants' logs where a call is unique, even
where no penalty has been applied. I believe this exactly analagous to the CQWW
UBNs. It can be useful feedback for the contestants, and also demonstrates that
the adjudicators are on the ball.
Incidentally, worse than uniques are those calls which appear maybe 20 or 30
times in the logs, and which therefore have some sort of spurious validity, but
which turn out to be broken spots on the Cluster. A download from DX Summit
soons enables me to spot these, and it's then quite interesting to note those
supposed "non-assisted" entrants who happened to "work" that broken call!
73 Don G3XTT (g3xtt@lineone.net)
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